My friend Mike Petrilli at the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently sent me a post from the Institute’s daily blog called “Chartering the Future” by Andy Smarick. Mike sent it with a note, saying, “you won’ t like this.” He’s right, I didn’t like it at all. And yet, if you read to the end, you will see that Andy and I end up in agreeing on one important point.

The post is a summary of Smarick’s new book; he argues that urban school systems are so broken that they should be eliminated and replaced by charters, lots and lots of charters. In a previous article in the conservative journal Education Next, Smarick argued that “turnarounds” are a waste of time because broken schools can’t be fixed, they must be closed, abandoned and replaced by charters. The article was called “The Turnaround Fallacy,” and the subtitle was “Stop trying to fix failing schools. Close them and start fresh.”

I won’t get into an extended exegesis of the works of Mr. Smarick, whom I knew slightly in my final days as a member of the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Suffice it to say that his arguments begin with the assumption that the schools and the system are broken, whereas I have concluded that the schools are struggling to educate children who have been harmed by poverty and societal neglect. Their low scores are a symptom of social failure, in my view, more often than they are a grade of school or teacher quality. If poverty is the cause of low academic performance, as it appears to be on every standardized test and in every nation, then we might see better results by reducing poverty than by opening charter schools.

The fact that a small handful of charter schools get different results is not proof that all charter schools can get equally wonderful test scores. Bill Bennett used to say that one example of success was an “existence proof” of what could be done with sufficient determination. But you might just as well say that if one man–or 50–can run a four-minute mile, then we should expect all men and women to run a four-minute mile. After all, there is an existence proof, and now there is more than one. So why can’t everyone do it?

So far as I can tell from Andy Smarick’s resume, he has never been a teacher or worked in a school. He had something to do with starting up a KIPP, but the rest of his resume speaks of his ascendance in the world of policy wonks, rising through the ranks in Republican circles, at the state and federal level. He worked as a legislative assistant to a Republican congressman; he was chief operating officer for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools; he worked for a time in Governor Christie’s Department of Education; he did something in the George W. Bush administration; he worked with Bellwether Education Partners, a D.C. consulting group run by TIME columnist Andy Rotherham. He is now associated with two Beltway conservative think tanks: the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

With his impressive list of credentials, there are two that he does not have: he has never been a teacher in an urban school, and he has no qualifications as a researcher or scholar of education. He is a policy person through and through. He is, in today’s parlance, a wonk. That’s the sort of person that James Scott of Yale wrote about in his insightful book called Seeing Like a State.

People who “see like a state” always have large ideas about how to re-arrange other people’s lives from 30,000 feet up. They are the sort of people who raze neighborhoods to make way for a highway or redirect rivers to achieve some lofty goal. They don’t care much about the people whose lives they disrupt. That’s not their problem.

Smarick doesn’t like public education. He likes privately managed charter schools getting public money. Given his limited experience, I wonder whether he has ever spent any time in good urban public schools. I doubt it.

Nothing that I have seen from his pen acknowledges that charters experience failure on the same scale as public schools. Nothing acknowledges that urban charters get no different results from public schools unless they somehow manage to minimize the number of students with disabilities and students who are English language learners and to exclude the students with behavioral and academic problems.

If this is the case, then what exactly would be accomplished by dismantling urban public education and handing it over to entrepreneurs?

But let me take a case at hand. On this blog, some weeks ago, I posted “the KIPP challenge.” I said that I was prepared to accept the miracle of KIPP if KIPP would agree to take over an entire troubled urban school system and leave no child behind. Take all the children–the motivated, the unmotivated, the strivers, the indifferent, the failing, the autistic, the homeless, the just-released from incarceration, the blind, the gifted–all of them, like public schools. Show us how you can scale up. Show us how you can work your magic for all children. The response was a howl of outrage. I was asked, how dare I suggest that KIPP “change its mission.”

Well, as I understand Andy Smarick’s latest statement, he joins me in the KIPP challenge. Find one impoverished district that is willing to invite KIPP in, and let’s see how it works out. Take all the children. Open your doors to all. Do it in one place before imposing it on everyone.

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I can see how Andy could be considered a educational expert given his training and impressive resume. It is amazing how an individual like Andy would be hired to address issues that he is not even remotely trained in or have any experience. But given the corporate driven education agenda in America I am not surprised. I am not surprised given America’s historic failure and concern for educating poor and minority children.
Let’s challenge the reformers to implement their crazy ideas in the schools “their” children attend. You can bet they would take the KIPP challenge before putting their children through such senseless madness.

Charters never teach the same children as the neighborhood schools. Charters always enroll via application. Therefore, charter students all have parents who are sufficiently concerned/functional to learn about the charter, complete the application, and provide the daily transportation usually required to get the student to the charter. Given the many low-SES families in the inner-city, there are many parents who are not sufficiently concerned/functional to enroll their children in the charters; the children of these parents will all go to the neighborhood public school. The children of the concerned/functional parents will — on average — be better behaved, more motivated, and more likely to read at grade level than the children of the unconcerned/dysfunctional parents. Therefore, the charters will — on average — have students who are much easier to educate than the neighborhood schools. (And, of course, the charters can always expel the occasional misbehaving/unmotivated student back to the neighborhood school.)

Given this huge advantage that charters enjoy over the neighborhood school regarding student behavior/motivation, one would expect charters to uniformly outperform the neighborhood schools on student test scores. The fact that many charters perform only as well as or worse than the neighborhood schools is strong evidence that the instructional programs in the charters is weaker than the instructional programs in the neighborhood schools.

Like you, I’d love to see a charter take over an entire school population. I’ve seen references (but no specifics) to KIPP having done this once in Denver — an experiment that allegedly ended in failure after a few years.

I can see from Andy’s impressive training and experience that he is more than qualified as an educational expert to call for the extinction of public schools.

I am not surprised that in this crazy education reform age that a person of Andy’s background is hired and respect in the field of education. This is typical in the corporate driven education reforms that is sweeping the country. More importantly these kind of bad ideas is in keeping with the historic failure and lack of concern for educating poor and minority children in America.

Maybe we should challenge Andy to implement his reform strategy in the schools where his and other reformers children attend. I think that Andy and other reformers would very well accept your challenge Diane that put their own children at risks.

I think about the idea of the “KIPP challenge” in a large heterogeneous district like Chicago. Not only would KIPP no doubt fail miserably in trying to educate all children, especially children with special needs, English Language learners, children with behavior problems, etc, but there would be a major revolt by parents if KIPP even attempted to try. The truth is that middle class/upper class white familities would simply not allow their children to be taught in the rigid, “no excuses” KIPP training program. White middle class families would be in an uproar if their children were being taught by uncertified, poorly-trained, inexperienced Teach for America novices. They do not want extra-long days of test-prep/academic training, but rather want their children to experience a wide-range of after-school activities including music, art, or sports. In fact, it was white middle class parents in Chicago that voiced some of the loudest opposition to Rahm Emanuel’s longer school day fiasco. And when NBC’s Brian William (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/49202614#49202614) highlighted the KIPP character education program (think “grit”), the leader of the elite Riverdale Country School said flat-out that his upper-class parents would not accept KIPP-style “character education”, and implemented an entirely different program. What KIPP schools, and other similiar charter franchises, offer is something being sold exclusively to low-income students of color. This is separate and very unequal education.

You left out three important conditions:
1) You and Mike get to name the oversight team of teachers who will have access to classrooms to observe instruction AND to faculty and professional development meetings to observe admin-teacher interaction
2) That all assessment results and data for the last 5 years and for the duration of the hypothetical KIPP management will be posted in within two weeks of the their receipt by school central management. The data will be broken out by school and grade level and will show not only BB, B, Prof & Adv, but also NCE and scale scores.
High schools will post ACT results and the College Board’s “School Integrated Summary” that shows PSAT, SAT, and AP results by AP course and the number of students earning each score..
Enrollment numbers by grade & number testing; daily absentee numbers, monthly numbers of truants and incident reports, by category, etc. will be posted on each school’s website:
The number of students graduating from each high school, using the Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate AND showing the calculation, so we can see if the Cohort base (starting 9th graders) is decreasing in size.

3) Finally, that KIPP will be required to set aside a fund for a researcher to conduct an audit level review of the data. You (or I) or a research we name will be be contracted to conduct the audit reviews.
There’s more, but that’s a good start.

While I would anticipate utter embarrassment for KIPP (pre-spin, of course) in taking over a single urban school system, there is a chance that they will eek out a nominal victory.

Why?

Because pilot projects always work. You can bet that KIPP would funnel their top talent and resources to this “showcase” and manage to show some progress on some measure in some group of students at some school.

Before you award the prize money, make sure that KIPP can recreate their initial success in a second district. Then I will kick in $100 to the purse. We’ll make it like the Randi Prize – everyone chip in to put up a million bucks. Randi’s pot is still i the bank. I imagine ours would be safe for a long time ,too.

“Their minds seem like clean slates upon which we can write.” – Dr. Cyril J.C. Kenndy and Dr. David Anchel on the benefits of electroshock therapy.

This ‘start fresh’ mindset smells a lot like electroshock therapy to me. It reminds me of the scientists at McGill University wanting blank slates on their seriously ill patients in order to create a new, healthy and better mind. Disaster Capitalism is the same concept but rather for whole countries and not individual humans. Create or invite intense turmoil and distress and then it is easier to implement radical economic policies in order to purport privatization, deregulation and busting unions. It’s shock therapy when you boil it down to the bone.

Naomi Klein’s book, Shock Doctrine, eerily reminds of what is happening in America today with our clash on education. The narrative that is spun these days, as you always say, is that our education system is in crisis and we NEED to implement innovative, radical ideas in order to revive it from utter death. Even though we know this to be untrue from increasing NAEP scores and the recent studies showing that charters don’t do better than TPS, the damage is already done. The spin created by billionaire hedge fund managers (like Bruce Rauner), PR/Marketing Teams from abundantly resourced charter schools (KIPP), and let’s not forget the gazzillionaire Ed Reformer Bill Gates and his Foundation has already persuaded and brainwashed the public into believing that we have an education catastrophe on our hands. It made sense why so many people, who are not familiar with education, believe this tall tale. And Karen Lewis so kindly answered it at the City Club event, “They have a bigger microphone.”

I could continue writing about the scary parallels between the Shock Doctrine and Education Reform but we know all this. We all know what the “reformers” want. Although Klein’s book was written specifically for economic policies, one simply needs to substitute the words economic policy with education policy and the book, amazingly, flows just the same.

There is a lot of money to be made in this untapped public sector. And Pure Capitalists, true believers in free markets want their greedy little hands on our public schools. We are treading a dangerous path where privatization of our nation’s education can become a reality. The line has been drawn, which side are you on?

There was one experiment similar to what DR and AR propose: a baker’s dozen of Baltimore elementary schools were assigned either to Edison/Tesseract or to remain as BPS. A detailed study was done by some researchers at UMBC; links to the study are at my blog. I won’t pretend to recall all of the details, but I recall from what I wrote and graphed a few years ago that there was essentially no difference between the two groups of schools in performance on the tests they were using at the time.

Except at one school where the principal and one of the teachers (one Michelle Rhee) devised a two-fold way of producing a small increase in apparent test score results:
1. Push out enormous percentages of students from one year to the next, and
2. Take advantage of the fact that the testers simply disregard the score of any student whose scores are below a certain level.
At that school, Harlem Park, attrition was much higher than at any other school studied, and the numbers of students whose scores were set aside was much higher than in any other school studied.

We all know that Ms Rhee later rode this small, fraudulent blip in scores to fame and fortune.

And what about this Edison experiment?

The city of Baltimore canceled the experiment because Edison schools actually cost MORE than the regular public schools AND produced results equal to or worse than the regular public schools.

Andy Smarick left GovChristie’s DOE after closing 3 charter schools. I always wondered why. I was the director of one of them. Emily Fisher charter. Many of our students never went back to any school and are now in prison or dead. Did Mr Smarick see that coming?